day one Trailer

ABOUT THE FILM

Story

Inspired by a true story, DAY ONE depicts a new translator’s first day accompanying a US Army unit as it searches for a local terrorist. As she quickly discovers, her job will bring up brutal complexities as gender and religious barriers emerge with lives hanging in the balance.

Director's Statement

In boots, my interpreter stood just over five feet tall. Her father had given her a man's name, but her story is a classic woman's saga of finding herself after divorce. She just happened to do all this soul searching with a group of forty infantrymen, getting shot at on a remote mountaintop in Afghanistan. On patrol, she held a dog's leash connected to my body armor. She had fallen during one particularly frightening firefight that ended with us running hand in hand toward the safety of a large hole in the ground. We had landed in a farmer's cache of fertilizer--a literal pile of shit. As we laughed together, I realized that, as the platoon leader, I needed both the use of my hands and her proximity at all times to communicate. So from that point on, the leash connected us.

In 2009, the director served with US forces fighting in Afghanistan. This story was inspired by his interpreter.

This woman, my interpreter, is a fighter. My family fights. It's what we do; we've served continuously since the Revolutionary War. Fighting beside her changed me. It changed the way I understood universal love. I left the army after my tour with her in order to pursue filmmaking and when the time came to make a film about the war, I knew I would start with her story. I had found this one woman in a masculine world both bridging and challenging gender and culture norms. Her strength provided a light strong enough to cut through the fog of war. She is so many things: American, Muslim, female, combat veteran. She is also my muse.

CAST

About the AFI Conservatory

At the world-renowned AFI Conservatory, a dedicated group of working professionals from the film and television communities serve as mentors in a hands-on, production-based environment nurturing the talents of tomorrow's storytellers. The Conservatory is consistently recognized as one of the world’s top film schools.

With an emphasis on narrative visual storytelling and personal expression, each class breaks into teams that mirror a real production environment. Those teams collaborate on and produce more films than any other graduate level film program.

Established in 1969, the two-year Master of Fine Arts program provides training in six filmmaking disciplines: Cinematography, Directing, Editing, Producing, Production Design and Screenwriting. Admission to AFI Conservatory is highly selective, with a maximum of only 140 graduates per year.

Among the many notable alumni

DAVID LYNCH (Dir.) Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Dune

AMY HECKERLING (Dir.) Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

TERRENCE MALICK (Dir.) Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, Tree of Life